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Posted: March 10th, 2012, 9:27pm CST by Paul B
I have a yellow wrasse that doesn't look too well. I don't remember how old it is but I don't have it that long, maybe a year or two. I got it full grown.
For the last few months he is having trouble swimming. Wrasses don't swim well anyway but this one seems to have a tail that is semi paralized.
He looks good, eats and gets around but fish, like people also develop other diseases and maladies that we can't see on their skin. We usually see spots, discolorations, fungus, fin rot or scratching but we often forget that fish also have internal organs, a circulatory system and a nervous system that are subject to disease just as we do. When we get sick, most of the time you can't tell just by looking at our skin. As a matter of fact, you can rarely tell just by looking at our skin. (unless we have an arrow sticking out of our head)
Fish also sucumb to internal problems and possably auto immune diseases even cancer (except sharks, they don't get that)
I would also imagine that fish can get heart attacks and strokes. Those things are just things that can happen to any animal with a heart and brain.
If this fish dies, I will not autopsy it because I know it is a nervous system problem and an autopsy will not reveal anything that I could see with "my" primitive equipment.
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Posted: March 6th, 2012, 4:53pm CST by Paul B
I kind of like bristleworms but now I just have too many of them. Whenever I move a rock I notice it is loaded with the little slimers. I recently had a small clam up on the rocks and it fell onto the gravel. The worms sucked it out in no time so now it is war. Over the years I have made dozens of bristleworm traps and just about any design works. You can even put a piece of clam or fish into a piece of stocking and they will be stuck all over it.
This design I made in about 5 minutes and put it in the tank last night with a piece of clam. It netted 5 worms over night. I will use it for a few weeks to reduce the population to manageable levels.
It is just an acrylic tube about 1 1/4" in diameter but any pill case will work. I stuck in a smaller tube about 3/8" in diameter. Any tube will work as long as it is small enough to keep out the crabs and snails. The tube needs to extend into the container a little so the worms can't figure how to get out. Lobster traps work on the same principal. And lobsters are smarter than worms.
The worms have a great sense of smell and will find the bait but the end of the tube should be at sand level. For this model I bent the tube down to hit the sand.
I also have a string on it so I don't have to stick my hands in the water.
Have fun
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I am learning on this camera. I never took a video with it so I tried again with the focus locked. It doesn't get me as dizzy, but still not perfect.:(
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All fish in the sea know how to find their food and in a tank it is even easier for them. The problem is that in the sea Mother Nature supplies food all day, every day. We as humans have other lives and usually don't want to feed our fish continousely. At least I don't. Also some fish are just designed to eat a tiny bit all day because that is just the way their digestive systems were designed. Fish like pipefish and seahorses don't even have a real stomach, just a short tube that acts like a stomach and intestine. These types of fish can not store food as other fish can. Other fish with similar digestive systems are mandarins and any other fish that normally lives on tiny food such as pods. These fish can not even eat a large meal if it were offered to them which is also the reason for their tiny mouths.
For this reason I am a big advocate of feeding stations.
My tank is old and loaded with pods so I really don't have to do this but sometimes a certain fish needs a little help even if the tank is full of pods.
I recently aquired a baby female that is very skinny. I am hoping she matures to mate with my large male.
I hatch and feed live baby brine shrimp to my tank every day and most of the fish eat them, even the larger gobies but this food disappears in a few minutes. Some of it gets skimmed off or caught in powerheads and the rest migrate to the surface because baby brine shrimp are attracted to light.
Most fish that would eat pods, live on the bottom so that food is lost to them.
This feeding station is designed for baby brine shrimp. It is just a plactic container with a mesh over it that barely passes baby brine.
It also has a tube running to the surface so I can fill it with shrimp.
I fill it in the morning and fish just hang around it all day sucking out shrimp.
Many shrimp also escape to be caught by the corals.
About 15 years ago I designed and patented this type of feeding station for adult brine shrimp.
http://www.breedersregistry.org/Arti...l_b/paul_b.htm (I do not sell these)
I have also used a different type of feeding station to feed moorish Idols.
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I have this bubble algae growing in a few places in my tank and in some places it is very heavy. I am not worried about it and kind of like it, but anyway, I noticed that it is just growing on my home made cement rock or the cement on bottles and none of it is growing on any real rock.
It started in my algae trough which is a screen coated in cement. The trough was so filled with this bubble algae that it overflowed and the entire thing fell into the tank from the weight.
I find this extreamly facinating that "rocks" made with cement that have been in the tank for many years, some decades could still leach something into the water to attract or at least allow these forms of algaes to live.
My cement algae trough was so covered in this bubble algae that I removed the screen and threw it away and replaced it with a clean screen with no cement on it but I think that was a mistake. I am going to replace that screen with a cement coated screen for two reasons. I don't want my reef covered in this bubble algae (although I like it in some places) but it "may" be beneficial for the water.
I love this stuff.
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I was just looking through some pictures from a couple of years ago and I noticed the progression of one of my Euphyllia type of corals.
These are an easier type of coral to keep but I didn't realize it had grown so much because I see it every day.
I think this first picture is about 3 years ago, then two years ago, then today.
In the last picture the coral is about 10" across but most of it is in the dark and can't be seen.
I feed this, and all my LPS clams almost every day and it seems to have a positive outcome on their growth. I also feed this coral pellets that I soak in fish oil.
At first I had a problem with it as I do with all small things in the tank due to the urchin
I feed fresh clams (which I freeze) by slicing off tissue thin slivers. Clams are hard to cut and messy if they are not frozen. One chowder clam is about 75 cents and lasts a couple of weeks. All of my animals including the fish get clams as well as live worms. Clams are a very good food because they are one of the only foods besides mysis and worms where we can feed the entire animal and not just the muscle as what happens when we feed scalop, squid or fish fillets. Almost all of the nutrients are in the guts of the animal.
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Yesterday I watched a 4" bristle worm get cozy with the glass heater. He wrapped around it like a boa constrictor and seemed comfortable.
Then the heater came on and bristle worms are not really good jumpers so he fried.
The arrow crab who loves fried foods walked over and unwrapped the worm and has been feasting all night. :thumbup:
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I love it when something new grows in my tank, even if it is something that many people think is a plague. I just find it interesting. This is the stuff that stirs my interest in this lifelong hobby.
This stuff started growing on my rocks a few months ago and at first I thought it was some type of coral. It turns out it is some sort of invasive bubble algae but for some reason it is not that invasive.
It only seems to grow in certain places and I think it makes the rock much more facinating. I really don't like the look of new, clean, sterilized rock and know that if my rock ever gets like that I know something is wrong.
This is a DIY, hollow cement "rock"
Here is another piece with a little tuft of hair algae growing on a frayed string. It is the only hair algae in the tank and I also find that interesting so I leave it alone.
There is very little algae in the rest of the tank but I do have a nice growth of short turf algae in some places. This comes from where I collect rocks and water in the Long Island Sound.
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Getting into this hobby was easy for me. My family owned a seafood business and I grew up playing with dead fish so it was natural for me to start a tank. Of course at 2 or 3 years old I needed a little help.
On fridays my Dad would bring me to the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan which was the place that supplied seafood for all of New York.
The place was huge and the ships would dock there and the fish would be off loaded right into the street. There would also be huge sea turtles that were (unfortunately) destined to become soup.
Anyway, every once in a while in that mountain of fish you would find some small animal still alive like a crab, shrimp or even a seahorse.
My Dad would let me take those animals home and put them in some water. I only had fresh water so nothing lived more than a few hours but at least I got a taste of how amazing it was to actually take a living piece of the ocean and transport it to my home where I would stay up all night watching and probably trying to feed it.
I had more luck with the freshwater animals like catfish, eels and diamond back terripins. At least I could keep those animals alive.
In those days even a lot of the common freshwater fish we have now were not for sale.
I remember my facination when ever I would go to an aquarium store and see something new. Fish were originally sold in toy stores and called "toy fish"
There were no strictly aquarium stores because even the freshwater hobby was not common before WW2.
There were also no plastic bags so fish came in those little cardboard containers that Chinese take out places sell rice in.
When saltwater fish came out in 1971 I was in total awe and the only fish were blue devils. Imagine seeing a blue devil when for my entire life the only blue fish I ever saw was a blue gourami or a neon tetra. Blue devils blew my mind and I had to have them.
I would sit for hours starring at them just as I did when I was a todler looking at a dying crab in a glass of fresh water.
To this day I am still facinated by anything from the sea, especially something that I have never seen before. Thats the main reason I started SCUBA diving, that and finding lobsters. Now, at my age I have seen just about everything you can see related to the hobby but I still frequent stores in the hope I will find something new.
In a store I don't look at the dozens of yellow tangs, the schools of surgeon fish or the angels, I look behind the rocks and in sumps for the rare specimin that came in with other things and no one knows exactly what to call it. That is what I am looking for.
I have a few fish in my tank now that I don't know what they are and they are my favorites.
I am even more facinated by crustaceans. I put on my magnifying glasses and check out the shellfish (yes I look very wierd, it's a good thing I am married because this behaviour does not attract a lot of supermodels)
Hermit crabs are extreamly cool, they go to great lengths to get to obscure places looking for food even though they would probably do better just sitting on the bottom.
They hang up side down and seem to be struggling just to stay put. But I can see where they are coming from, we humans scale mountains just for the fun of it and do wierd things to attract a mate. They are such facinating creatures and so much more advanced than we are in certain traits.
I still have no idea how they find food but they find it all and never make a mistake. I have a bunch of them, I don't know how many but if I drop in a few pellets or a piece of clam and I see it on the gravel, in about 10 seconds I see all the hermit crabs change direction and head for the food. It will most likely be gone when they get there but how do thay do it? I doubt they see very well and the water in the tank is swirling all over the place. How do they know what direction it is? It goes right over my head and this is the stuff that keps me up at night.
I am amazed by all of this stuff. Why don't fish crash into the glass? It's their lateral line system but imagine having a radar system like that. A school of tangs can instantly dive into a stand of acropora coral and not one of those fish will get a scratch.
Maybe it's me but I love this stuff.
How do you people feel about this hobby? :blush:
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I thought it would be interesting to talk about some of the odder things some of us do that is not the norm.
Thanks to computers and the internet much of this hobby has become a cookie cutter endeavour and many people do the same things the same way.
I started way before the internet so there was no easy way to exchange ideas so I had to develop them myself. I have been doing these things for so long that I forget and think everyone does it that way, but I find that I am wrong. When I post these Ideas, people just look at me funny. Well, I can't really see them, but I think they are looking at me, or at least the computer screen funny.
So I decided to write down some of the wierd-ish things I do that some people may not have heard of. If you did, just humor me.
I think I will start with Pop Eye. I just answered a post about this and the person is still looking at me, or the computer screen anyway.
Fish get Pop Eye all the time, I don't know exactly why and neither does anyone else. I know there are all sorts of theories but trust me, no one knows for sure. But no matter what caused it, it is easy to treat. This usually heals on it's own with no help from us and I would wait a while to see if that happens, but if it keeps getting worse, the eye could completely pop out. That is not real good and I know I would not like that happening to me. Of course I don't think fish feel pain like we do but that is for another post where everyone can yell at me for my opinion.
If the fish has a severe case of Pop Eye, no matter what caused it, the eye is protruding for one of two reasons. One is gas behind the eye and one is pus from an infection. Either way it is not an eye problem but a malfunction in the way the fish was designed. If you look at a fish skull, you see a dent in it where the eye goes and a tiny hole in the back where the optic nerve attaches to the eyeball. Once gas or a infection gets back there, the preasure has no place to go so it pushes out on the eye. (we have sinuses and all sorts of places for preasure to go, not that it makes us feel any better but our eyes don't usually pop out) It does not seem like there is any blood flow to that area because there are no veins that I can see and no hole through the skull for the vein to enter. There also would be no need for blood flow there as the eye has it's own blood supply that seems to travel with the optic nerve. Of course I am not a fish surgeon but I do occasionally operate (if their insurance covers it)
Anyway, the preasure needs to be releived so the eye can get back to where it is supposed to go.:(
To do this, I catch the fish and hold it in a net. I position the fish so that I have access to his eye. Then I take a sterile hypodermic needle with nothing in it and gently stick it in the thin stretched skin that is still holding the eye in. Usually the top part is stretched the most. Then I pull back on the plunger and the eye instantly goes back to where it is supposed to be. Either air or a milky fluid will come out. Sometimes the eye does not go back all the way and I do it again the next day.
If I notice that there is fluid and not just gas, sometimes I inject a little injectable antibiotic, then remove it.
In the 45 years or so and the dozens of patients I have done this on, I have never lost a patient, been sued, caused blindness, or could not cure the fish.
I don't puncture the eye and the needle can not penetrate into the brain because the skull is totally behind the eyeball.
Now for people who think this is barbaric, and you know why you are. Just think, if your eye was hanging out of your head to the point where you could lose it and someone said to you that they could totally cure you in 5 seconds would you say, "Oh my God No, I kind of like my eye like this, maybe I could get on TV" Or would you say, "hurry up and do the dam thing?":yeahdude:
I will post another one tomorow, in the meantime, if anyone has any un orthodox ways to do things, feel free to post as I am not the God of fish tanks.:biggrin:
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I have to admit that I wrote this over a year ago and am just pasting it here.
It is just my opinions about mostly the food aspect of keeping fish in healthy, disease free shape.
I don't know much about SA but here in the States I can buy a food called Live Black worms. They are something like tubifex but a little fatter.
I feed these worms every day along with newly hatched baby brine shrimp to the smaller fish and corals.
I strongly feel that the main ingredient missing from our fishes diet is oil.
Fish do not have any solid fat but they are loaded with oil. Most fish can not digest fat because their body temperature does not allow the fat to melt and most of it just passes through their system. Pelagic sharks can and do eat warm blooded animals because they are kind of warm blooded (but for a different reason than us)
I also feed fresh clams as there is also important elements in the guts of almost any animal and when we feed clams, we feed the guts as well as the muscle.
Fish in the sea do two things, eat and spawn. They spawn every few weeks and if a fish does not have the capacity to lay eggs, it is not very healthy at all.
A fishes spawn is almost all oil and a big demand is put on a fish to acomplish this.
To get fish in this condition in a tank they need to be fed oil, lots of oil.
Fish eat fish which can be 20% oil. It is missing in commercially prepared foods because it goes bad. Even if frozen.
Worms are an excellent source of oil as is new born brine shrimp. (they lose their nutritional value in a few hours)
Baby fish is the best food for our fish but unfortunately not yet available. I have spoken to "Ocean Nutrition" about this but to no avail.
I suppliment the worms with pellets that I soak in fish oil, the same type that I take. Fish need oil every day to stay in breeding condition and fish in breeding condition live forever and hardly, if ever get sick.
Here is the article I wrote a while ago:
There are so many problems or concerns in this hobby about fish diseases. I really don't know why so many people have problems with this but I have a hunch.
Our fish in the sea never really die of old age. A fish, unfortunately, is an animal that usually ends it's life as supper for some other animal, being either another fish, seal, bird or humans. Even a fearsome great white shark will eventually grow so old and slow that it can no longer catch sea lions and it will starve to be eaten by other less fearsome animals.
But in a captive envirnment fish can live for years or decades. And they should. Fish have evolved a fairly elaborate immune system because they have been here for millions of years longer than us, well most of us. The fact that live in a watery envirnment demands that their immune system function well because the sea is host to all the chemicals, minerals bacteria and viruses on earth. The water is actually an extension of the fishes circulatory system so whatever is in the water, is also in the fish.
We humans have it much easier because we only need to inhale air and not everything else on earth.
This immune system works almost flawlessly but only if the fish is in perfect health. Through my observations it seems that their immune system is severly compromised by a lack of certain things in their diet along with stress.
We can't do much about the stress of captivity short of releasing the fish to the wild but we can do much about their diet.
Fish IMO should almost never get sick. If we have a town of 100 people and a human lifespan is about 80 years then most people should live about 80 years, some 60 some 100 but on average.
If out of those 100 people absolutely none of them reach 30 years old and 10% of the rest of them come down with something, you may not want to live in that town.
Fish want to live and if they get sick it is usually our fault.
Keeping the immune system of a fish healthy is paramount to keeping the animal disease free. Even paracite free although I don't know exactly how they become immune to paracites but I know they do.
My tank is no better than anyone elses but I have not lost a fish to a disease in decades. Why is that?
I doubt it is my UG filter, people just laugh at that. I don't think it has to do with my ozone although that could help. I don't change nearly as much water as most people. I get the fish from many different sources.
It has to be either the bacteria I add from the sea, but I don't see how that would help. Or the food.
I am betting on food. I could be wrong because I am not the God of fish and not an expert. By the way, there are no experts because this is a hobby. No one has a degree in hobbies although some people think they do.
I am only going by my own observations here and my 40 years of hanging out underwater.
The best food for most fish is fish. Whole fish, guts liver bones, scales and all.
I myself don't usually feed whole fish, i wish I could but I do feed live whole worms, whole fish eggs and whole clams after I freeze them.
If you do much diving you will see millions of tiny fish fry all over the place near the bottom, this makes up a large part of a fishes diet. Not flakes, pellets or freeze dried anything.
I believe it is the guts of the prey fish that keeps the immune system functioning properly. Specifically the liver which is mostly oil.
A 100lb shark is almost 20lbs oil. Fish need this oil to maintain bouyancy and to produce eggs.
Only the healthiest fish can spawn because making babies is a great challenge for a fish. It not only needs nourishment to keep itself alive but it needs a huge amount of extra nutrients to produce fry which at that point are mostly oil.
If a fish is spawning or making spawning jestures it is in excellent health. Fish in excellent health have excellent immune systems.
Fish with excellent immune systems do not get sick.
Again, this is only my theory and this entire hobby is based on mostly theory.
Have a great day.
Paul
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Hair algae is something that scares a lot of people and for good reason.
I only have one place in my reef where I grow it on purpose.
This was a string that I had tied to a coral that was at one time suspended from above the tank. I cut the string and let it unravel. It grew this tuft of hair algae in no time. I also collect amphipods like this, I cut a rope and unravel it. Then I hang it under my boat. It gets loaded with amphipods in a few days. This would alo house pods in a tank if I allowed it to rest on the substrait and is a good way to have a safe haven for them.
I find this one piece of hair algae interesting so I leave it alone. I don't have any tangs at the moment and the algae bleeny is not interested so there it stays.
Just felt like sharing
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A while ago I added a Shrimp/gobi combination and just today they moved to a home at the back corner of the tank under my overflow skimmer.
Anyway they are in a place where food never gets to so I shot some pellets near them. In less than a minute the entire corner of the tank extending about 5" both ways was a maze of large 6" bristleworms. I knew I had a bunch of them but I never knew I had so many. They were crawling all over the shrimp and gobi who didn't seem to mind.
If anything dies in this tank it wil be gone in minutes. Great scavengers, and I will try to get a better picture.
I would imagine the worms are a larger percentage of the livestock than my fish.
Very cool. :yeahdude:
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I don't know about most people but I have a problem with small corals staying put. Especially is you have a type of fish that like to re aquascape.
Yes, you can glue everything in but that makes it hard to move things later if need be.
I like to use lead. I know if fresh water they sell lead strips to wrap around plants to keep them anchored but with reef tanks we don't like using any metals so I cut thin strips of lead and cover them with shrink tubing.
The shrink tubing can be gotten at any Radio Shack or even (I think) Home Depot. The lead I get from a plumbing supply or a scrap metal dealer. It is very cheap.
You can make it as heavy as you like and wrap it around the base of the coral.
You can even make longer strips and bend it around corals and larger rocks to secure them. The shrink tubing is black so you don't really see it.
Now my larger fish have a hard time throwing my nicely positioned corals to the substrait.
Have fun.
Lead and shrink tubing
Finished piece
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Old fish. What is an old fish? I am not sure but I do know that some fish live a really long time. How long? Real long, like over 20 years. I think most larger fish can live much longer than that but the small fish we normally keep seem to have a much shorter lifespan. From my experience tangs can live well into their twenties but I have never kept one longer than about 14 years. After that they seem to have accidents. Even percula clowns live over 20 years. Some types of fish have very short lifespans like seahorses and pipefish. I can not keep seahorses more then about 3 years. Of course they are probably a couple of years old when I collect them so I am not sure of their lifespan. Pipefish also, just a few years although the bluestripe I have now is about 3 or 4.
Why am I thinking about this? :1:
I think about all sorts of useless things and I just came back from a nice day on the water on my boat and as I was watching the bunker (menhaden) jump all around the boat, the thought hit me. How long do these things live?
As I look at my tank I have a watchman gobi about 5" long. He is about 12 or 13 years old and was part of a breeding pair. I got the pair when they were very young and after countless spawnings the female disappeared. I am assuming old age but fish get heart attacks, strokes, cancer and a bunch of other things. I am going with old age. I have no Idea how long watchman gobies are supposed to live but people are supposed to live to about 78 years or so. We all know that some of us die much younger and so do fish. My remaining watchman gobi is showing his age. He was very active for most of his life, scouring the bottom for food at night and coming to the glass in the daytime at feeding time. Now he kind of lays around waiting for me to squirt some food at him. When he grabs it, it is not with the same vigor that I am accustomed to seeing. He also chews for a long time before he takes another bite. Just like old people. He is clearly old and even has lines on his face. No really. I have noticed this twice before on two different fish. One was a 14 year old percula clown that was one of my first fish in the 70s and one was a 13 year old figure eight puffer that was my very first saltwater fish. He was actually bought in fresh water and then my tank was converted to brackish and then salt.
I once had a brutlyd or cusk eel who lived to 18 before I killed him in an accident. I don't remember if he had any lines but maybe his lifespan was 30 or 40 years, I don't know. :(
The watchman gobi is still very healthy and his blue spots seem like neon lights. Thats one way to tell a healthy fish, their colors seem irridescent and not dull.
My 17 year old fireclown does not seem to be showing his age as much but I can start to see the slight lines in his face and he is slowing down a bit. I also have a much younger fireclown and you can easily tell from their faces that this one is only half the age of the other one.
Now I know that fish do not age like us and they have much different skin so don't think I rub Oil of Oley on their faces but you cna definately tell an old fish from their face.
OK stop laughing, it's true. :biggrin:
Here they are young
And Old
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It's raining and I feel like rambling. Biodiversity. I am facinated by this. I also think it is a cool word. But for us aquarists it is restricted to marine animals, some good (for our tanks) and some bad (for our tanks). All animals are good for something, at least they think so. Even paracites have a purpose and a niche, although I can't think of one at the moment.
Looking at an aquarium we first notice the fish, then the corals and rocks and as we get closer and more interested, we can barely pick up movement in darker areas. Under and between rocks, crawling or slithering through the substrait. These are the things that facinate me. Yes I have some fish and corals but they are common. Everyone knows all about them and we all have or had them or at least seen them. But the creatures from the darker zones, thats where the real action is.
In my reef there are maybe 18 fish, but I would imagine that for each fish there are a hundred brittle stars, fifty bristle worms, a thousand amphipods and possably a million copepods. I never counted so don't hold me to those numbers.
But we rarely look at a tank and say "wow what a cool amphipod that is". Well I do, but I am a little strange.
Take a brittle star for instance, very cool animal. They hang out all day under a rock with one or two arms sticking out. I am not sure why they are hiding because almost nothing eats them. I guess it is because even though the fish don't eat them, they do pick them up, chew on them, then spit them out. Maybe that is the reason they hide. Good reason, anyway, how do they even know they are hiding? They have no eyes, no brain, and no ears. They don't even have a lateral line like all true fish have to help them get around. Instead of those sensors they have others more suited to a bottom dwelling animal. Even without eyes they can sense light. We can also if we just close our eyes we can tell light from dark. But what really facinates me about these and animals living in similar habitats is the fact that even without a brain, they are so much better at some things than we are. Maybe not basketball or pole vaulting but their ability to find food. We humans can smell certain foods from a few feet away but if you put blindfolds on us and put us in a room with 4 or 5 fans blowing the air all over the place I doubt we would know where the food was.
Snails and crabs can, as can brittle stars and bristle worms. Sharks can do that with blood and they can sense electrical signals but they have a brain.
I have a small tank with local snails, worms, crabs and shrimp. There is a small powerhead in there also. If I throw in a pellet, in about 5 seconds the seemingly sleeping snails all turn in the direction of the pellet and "race" to the exact place, trying to beat out the crabs. I don't know how much a dry pellet smells but I don't think it is all that much but I really don't have any idea how these "lower" animals can know the direction to go. Especially with the water swirling about, but they never falter, they know exactly what direction to go.
Amphipods are another cool animal. Most tanks don't have these as I collect them in the sea, they are different from copepods that are in all tanks as they are many times larger. We tend to call anything tiny a copepod but they are not all the same. Many of them are the young of crustaceans and most of them will die in a tank long before they get much larger than a real copepod. They haven't yet mastered the art of growing up away from the sea which is the reason we don't see baby hermit crabs or coral banded shrimp all over our tanks. Hermit crabs and shrimp spawn all the time as do all crabs and shrimp but the babies all die in a few days.
It must be frightening to be one of these animals, Oh wait, they have no brain so I guess they can't be frightened, good thing too because as a brittle star lays around waiting for a meal there are also, in the same hole bristle worms. They crawl all over each other but they don't seem to mind.
I guess these creatures make better neighbors than some of us.:blush:
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Bristle worms, a few years ago these things were a sign of doom. We thought they would eat our corals, fish, TVs and I Pods.
Sometimes my reef is full of tiny ones and other times like now there are only a few giant ones. I just fed the tank with blackworms, mysis and pellets and I was watching the fish eat.
Did you ever see the original 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea starring Kirk Douglas? Ok maybe you are too young but there was this squid about a hundred feet long and it was eating this submarine.
That is a close cousin to the bristle worms I have in my tank.
There was a few pellets on the gravel and I noticed some movement, from 4 different places. All of a sudden four giant tentacles as large as my couch, Ok maybe a little smaller, emerged from the rock and battled each other for this one pellet. I mean they were fighting so hard that two pictures fell off my wall. It was scary. One worm finally swallowed the pellet in one gulp and the other three retreated but the scowl on their faces would scare the yellow off a canary. No really. I just thought I would share this with you. :tt2:
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Lets talk about Undergravel filters, no really. Old technology? maybe but so is running water. When we got tired of going outside to pump water, we didn't stop using water . We invented faucets. OK not a great analogy. In the beginning of the aquarium hobby, which was right after WW2 we all kept goldfish and guppies. The first thing we did was to put in an undergravel filter, why? Because it worked. Originally we thought it was a mechanical filter and we loved mechanical filters because we liked to filter out particles. Water quality didn't matter as long as we could see the fish. Clear water was also essential to locate the dead fish, and we found a lot of dead fish.
Not because of the UG filter, but because we were using it wrong. We read the instructions and that was our first mistake. The people who invented and sold UG filters were not at fault, they also liked to filter things and an UG filter does that fairly well. Unfortunately, for some reason we didn't want to think of all that stuff that was filtered but still in the tank. We must have been busy watching those Ann Margaret movies.
But in our defense, freshwater systems do great with UG filters. I am not sure why but they do.
Then we all got high class and changed most of our systems to salt water. We loved our UG filters so we kept them, after all, they worked great and "filtered" out all that "stuff" that we figured we needed to filter. Then there was Bonanza on TV and we again forgot that an UG filter does not remove anything.
Boy were we stupid. Thats when 99% of us removed the UG filter. But there is something I like to call those people, and that is "wrong".
The UG "filter is fine, we were the problem. It is not a "filter" even though that is what it reads on the box, it is a water treatment system.
If we use it as a filter, our tanks will crash, guaranteed.
Robert Straughn (The Father of Salt Water fish Keeping) advocated UG filters as the greatest invention since tap water. The man was a genius but he didn't know the reason the UG worked.
The UG "System" will only work if we keep out the particles or as we like to call it "detritus" (dirt, crud, shmutz etc.) The gravel on the bottom of a tank vastly increases the real estate that bacteria can live on. Bacteria are like us, they like water front houses with continous fresh calm breezes and lots of easy to get food. Gravel is perfect for them and, like apartment buildings, they can live on top of each other without getting in each other's way.
Water with no particles flow past those bacteria, the bacteria process out what they want, which depending on the type of bacteria that could be nitrate, nitrite, ammonia
or Harvey's Brystal Cream. Too many particles and the bacteria will think they are living in a slum and the water flow along with their oxygen and food will stop.
Some bacteria are lucky and they like it when there is less oxygen, they have larger noses to collect oxygen, maybe not, I don't know, but they process nitrate in the absence of oxygen.
So some detritus in the gravel will limit oxygen and actually help those bacteria convert nitrate and detritus is going to get in there no matter what we do.
The best way to run a system like this is to take the UG filter and throw out the instructions. Then build a manifold above the water. Connect the tubes from the UG filter to the manifold and pump water into the manifold so all the tubes get a slow even flow. The water going into this manifold should first be strained to kep out those large smutz particles. Run this arrangement slow. The slower, the better.
Will this run for fifty years with no maintenance? Absolutely not. A few times a year you need to stick a canister filter of some type in there and stir up the gravel. It helps if most of the rock is not laying on the bottom. That doesn't look good anyway so figure out how to do a dynamite aquascape job.
It may get you a girlfriend, maybe not. :whistling:
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As I was looking at my algae trough tonight I noticed a bunch of hair algae in there which is what I want, but I also noticed about 2 dozen polyps.
They are soft, I thought they would be hard because they look like little 3/8" buttons but I touched them and they are soft. They are at the beginning of the trough where they get the most turbulence but the lease amount of light.
I don't yet know what they are but when I get time I will have to turn off the skimmer to stop the water flow so I can see them better and take some pictures. I have never seen these before but it seems that I get this a lot, things popping up from no where.
I can't tell if they are tropical or something from local NY waters.:blush:
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Posted: August 2nd, 2011, 1:08am CDT by Paul B
I like to keep my rocks off my substrait as much as posable but most of my rocks are large and heavy because I collected them in the sea.
Much of my new rock is hollow PVC with cement coating it. I am soon going to re aquascape and I will keep the rocks lifted off the gravel with these
structures. When it is in the tank under the real rocks, it should not be visable except for the column legs.
This first picture is of course the construction.
The thing cost less than a buck and took about an hour to complete
